Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to video surveillance systems and in particular, to viewing digital video streams from video surveillance cameras.
Description of Related Art
IP-based video surveillance systems with cameras streaming standard and high-definition video over networks to digital recorders and video management systems are becoming commonplace in the market. Such surveillance systems can found, for example, in airports, on city streets, in transportation facilities, in public shopping malls, in chains of retail establishments, and elsewhere. The flexibility of IP-based video surveillance potentially enhances the protection of assets, property and people.
However, although such cameras and systems are widely prevalent, finding the right and enough agents to actually view all of the real-time video has been a challenge. For example, in an airport or city having many hundreds or thousands of IP-cameras, real-time viewing can be problematic, since a single person or a few people in the airport or city security centers cannot keep up with the viewing load. One possible solution would be to deploy additional agents. Since the video streams flow over an IP network, and not over conventional coaxial video cables, the agents could be local or remote and located anywhere.
However, to-date there has not been a systematic approach for coupling human agents to the viewing of video surveillance camera streams. Existing video surveillance systems are heuristic and ad-hoc, and do not exploit factors such as agent-experience, how long an agent has been logged-in and viewing video, which video-analytic events trigger which agents, how and when agents simultaneously view the same video streams, and many other factors. Agents often miss critical events of interest, and many networked video cameras still remain completely unobserved.